


brittle rain

by suspishfish



Category: Pandora Hearts
Genre: F/M, Jack has a nice thing and ruins it, Jack is why we can't have nice things, M/M, also this is difficult to understand if you haven't read the entire series so keep that in mind too, nothing graphic but might just be a bit unsettling, there is also something akin to very very mild body horror, throw your oranges at Jack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-21
Updated: 2014-01-21
Packaged: 2018-01-09 10:00:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1144645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suspishfish/pseuds/suspishfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Breaking sounds like Paradise. Bending sounds like rattling the gates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	brittle rain

**Author's Note:**

> I am not very good at Jack. Or Oswald. So, naturally, the reasonable thing was to write with them both. Includes an excerpt from Retrace 68.

It's in dirty back way alleys where the forgery is born.

The parison expands with the breath of her summer song, and her volatility leaves impressions in his flesh with blades and tongues. She is beauty and cruelty and contrariness that feels too solid against his fingertips to be but an illusion of the winter, and yet she vanishes before his very eyes, his phantom author, his artist of the mirage.

He will hold nothing if it be not her essence and the promise of reunion.

* * *

Strangers' hot hands reshape him as seen fit. He does not yield up her signature.

* * *

Glass suits Jack quite prettily. 

It's an impressionable medium. One that lacks independence. One that the untrained eye might mistake for crystal or some other precious mineral. 

It merely masquerades as something far more important than it is.

Everything about him is meant to be flashy and frivolous. He is made of transparent smiles and nothing of substance, a vessel for keeping a mouthful of memory quietly preserved, one that tastes of copper snow and tart hope. It's a breath held for eight years till his lungs ache with the effort, till it turns to stale without his realizing. It is not Jack's purpose to know. He is vacuous to the core and filled with nothing but the scent of cold streets and bare knees and sweet licorice hair and _her Lacie just Lacie--_

It's almost a decade later when a splash of wine and a pair of eyes kissed by the dusk wrenches it from him.

Jack fears him for it.

* * *

Oswald's hand is broad and warm in his own. It is rough and worn and strong, one that protects and destroys but do not create, that wields a blade with a deadly precision.

So why does Jack not break apart in his grasp?

The tug to his feet is a gentle one. It is born of a begrudging servitude and silent tolerance, of some sense of duty that the blond cannot comprehend and questions before he can catch himself.

_'… Hey, Oswald…'_

_'What?'_

_'Is something wrong?'_

_'Why do you ask?'_

_'Well… It's just that… you look a little sterner than usual?'_

_'…'_

_'Oswald…?'_

_'N-Nevermind…'_

_'…'_

_'Is that all you wanted?'_

_'Y-Yes!?'_

Only Oswald ever catches him off-guard. Each and every sentiment that falls from the blond's lips is sweetened with careful practice. It is this honeyed insincerity allows him to move unnoticed through this den of lions… but not with him. Jack's answer is instinctual and unrehearsed, and he cannot fathom why. There is nothing he _wants_ but to see Lacie, and yet his response hints at something that turns the pit of his stomach to ice. Fitting that his uneasiness is just as transparent as the rest of him.

Thoughts return to the tower's blessed tenant, and all is as it should be once more.

* * *

Jack thinks each meeting between the two of them to be as innocuous as the one that came before it. Oswald is merely a conduit through whom he may reach Lacie and nothing more.

He should know better.

* * *

The first time he realizes something is amiss is the afternoon he clambers through an open window and stumbles across the duke-to-be brooding over a basket of tomatoes. Honesty feels foreign upon his tongue and tingles oddly the moment he confesses their friendship aloud. Jack spends a time rolling the echo of his declaration inside his mouth, tries at pressing it against the backs of his teeth until he finds he cannot pin it to his palate.

He bites down hard on his bottom lip with the intent to draw blood. Anything to distract from the taste he denies to be the sweetest he's ever known.

* * *

He does not fall meaning to be caught.

It all began as an innocent wager, just a simple exercise in speculation. To discover the properties of a metal, one must test its limits, must feel out its weaknesses, and atop the tower, Jack endeavors to bring Oswald's to light. 

Oswald is unyielding. Jack fancies him some dark and hardened stone, rooted deep in the earth that nothing but Lacie might move. So he believes… or fools himself into doing so.

Should he be correct, sweet release will come the moment his body strikes the ground, and perhaps they shall remember him as a shower of beautiful human glass. Should he be incorrect… No. He could not possibly be wrong. 

Because to be wrong would mean--

_'Jack, you bastard!'_

Where Jack is glass, Oswald is gypsum. No, it shouldn't be true, but it is, and oh! What a terrifying truth it is. Oswald is not strange and indestructible as he ought to be. He twists and leans and bends to catch a meaningless novelty from shattering upon the earth. He, too, is transparent and fragile and loses tiny fragments of himself each and every time they collide and is made of something oh so similar to Jack but no, something far more warm and genuine and not a cheap imitation that walks among men.

Jack has no value. He exists only to contain and reflect Lacie. No one is there. Oswald said it himself when they met, and yet the only thread that ties him to this world is the arm and broad shoulders that struggle to support his weight.

(When did he grow heavy? Begin to fill with something aside from fickle sighs and the scent of snow? Why now does he feel the gravity of a life that could be called his own? Weighed down with air thick with silence and the severe look of twilight...)

Choking on the conundrum doesn't kill him. Nothing is so simple anymore.

* * *

Jack disrobes when he returns to the Vessalius mansion that night. Guided by the flicker of a dying fire in the hearth, he brushes trembling fingertips over the inside of his wrist.

Indentations. Depressions. Fingerprints. Scrawled into his flesh is the evidence of love.

Oswald has plagiarized him, body and soul.

Melting down the glass man can salvage him, but there can be no restoration. Oswald has misshapen him, and there is no turning back.

* * *

It is with that very same hand that Oswald condemns him.

That hand has grown cold and resistant, the man which it belongs to transformed into a stranger Jack does not know, a man who is not Oswald but wears his face. 

It was not this man who saved him from his fall.

This is the man who will drive him to it.

* * *

_We were both bent, weren't we? With no hope of righting ourselves…_

_I am… still waiting for the break… and all this… it's entirely your doing. After all…_

_**You made me this way.** _


End file.
